What beneficial possibilities may arise from hybrid career paths which include the humanities?
by Hamish Adams*
As a young high school student, I went through a stage of wondering intensely about my future career plans. I was looking into the pros and cons of a career in medicine when I found a book in the library called Making the Cut by Professor Mohamed Khadra, a urological surgeon based in Sydney. In this memoir Professor Khadra vividly recounts the challenges of his journey to become a surgeon, being forced to endure the big egos of his superiors, the exhausting nights on-call and the constant awareness of mortality that comes from working with a scalpel.
I was a little shaken by this book, so I was confident I could rule out surgery from my list of career possibilities. Yet in the years since I read it, one aspect of Professor Khadra’s story has stuck with me: the inspiration and wisdom which the humanities, and particularly poetry, lent him during his pursuit of such a demanding career. As Khadra remarks at the start of his memoir, “[P]oetry is the study of humanity and we, as surgeons, are intimately and inextricably involved in the study of humanity.” (2009, p vii). The grandest themes of poetry are reflected in the drama unfolding on the operating table. For this reason, Khadra considers an engagement with the humanities to be essential to the training of the surgeon; “How could we hope to perform our task of healing without knowing about humankind, whose characteristics, in distillation, are the very essence of poetry?” (p. vii).
Of course, not all surgeons look so readily to poetry as a way to inform their practice, but the humanities must play a role in the medical sciences. Some medical practitioners have openly embraced this; for example, renowned Australian poet Peter Goldsworthy divides his time equally between writing and medicine. A family-friend who works as a cardiologist (and also happens to be a voracious reader of classics) once told me that in her view, medicine is a fusion between the arts and sciences. Without doubt, both disciplines can inform and nourish one another.
And this begs the question: if there’s such a symbiosis between the humanities and medicine, why couldn’t the same be said for the humanities and other professions?
Khadra, M 2009, Making the Cut: A Surgeon’s Stories of Life on the Edge, Heinemann Australia.
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* Hamish Adams is a final year Bachelor of Science and Diploma in Languages student at the University of Melbourne and an intern with Humanities 21.